Exploring the intersection of time and quantum mechanics

Category: Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics

I’ve submitted an extended abstract for my paper “Time and Quantum Mechanics” to the Center for Philosophy of Science’s workshop on Quantum Time. I’m not sure what the odds are of my getting in, but at a minimum prepping the abstract for the center has been a big help getting the paper organized, working out what is essential to the argument, and what can be let go.

Did my Quantum Mechanics, Reality, & You talk at Philcon this last weekend. Had a very energetic & engaged audience. My thanks to Ed Bishop, Tom Purdom, Ron Bushyager, Ferne Welch, Walt Mankowski, & lots of others for great questions! Did five panels as well. Full schedule:

The Standard Cosmological Model is the history of the universe as
arrived at over decades of observation and experiment and accepted
by the majority of scientists. It includes the Big Bang, Cosmic
Expansion, Inflation, Dark Matter, Dark Energy, etc. However, there
are real problems with the SM, and real (non-crank) scientists who
disagree with parts of it. What are the issues with Standard
Cosmology, and what alternative ideas are currently being discussed
Sat 12:00 PM in Plaza II (Two) (1 hour)
QUANTUM MECHANICS, REALITY, AND YOU (1319)

[Panelists: John Ashmead (mod)]

Behold the weird! Wigner and his panel of babies! The case of the
highly charged cat! The collapse of the collapse of the wave
function! And quantum chess! What’s new with quantum mechanics &
what does it all mean
Sat 1:00 PM in Plaza III (Three) (1 hour)
TIME TRAVEL FOR THE MILLIONS (1115)

If everyone could do it, how would this affect daily life? What are
the most frivolous uses of time travel we can think of? What would
be a time traveler’s practical joke
Sat 7:00 PM in Plaza II (Two) (1 hour)
FICTION ABOUT ITSELF: METAFICTION (1200)

Metafiction is when the story and the text becomes interchangeable,
each a part of the other. What are the roots and nature of this kind
of fiction
Sun 1:00 PM in Crystal Ballroom Three (1 hour)
EXOPLANETS AND SCIENCE FICTION (1124)

I’ve uploaded a number of my more recent talks to Slideshare. Physics, with occasionally a wee bit of speculation admixed:

Thought experiments – talk done 1st April 2012 for the Ben Franklin Thinking Society. Role of thought experiments in history, use by Galileo & by noted violinist, how they can turn into real experiments.

Not Your Grandfather’s Gravity – done last year (2011) on the latest developments in the suddenly hot area of gravity. The stuff on faster-than-light neutrinos is, alas, already out of date: boring won: looks as if the FTL neutrinos were due to experimental error. But Verlinde’s entropic gravity is still one of the most promising lines of attack.

Temporal Paradoxes – physics talk given at NASA’s Goddard Space Center 2011. A slightly NASA-fied version of a talk I’d given at several SF conventions in 2010.

These are not all of my talks — I’ve probably done 20 or 30 SF talks over the last 20 years, at least one per year — these are just the ones done using Keynote or Powerpoint. The 2005 & 2006 talks have gone walkabout. If they reappear, I will upload. I generally talk at Balticon, Philcon, & more recently Capclave. I’ve spoken twice at Farpoint, but that is really more of a media convention, not as good a fit.

Talks before 2002 were done with Word & overheads. Overheads are easier to make than slides, but have a tendency to get bent, flipped, out of order, or in one especially memorable talk: burnt. That talk I was doing at the Franklin Inn Club: the projector failed at the last minute & I had to rent another from a nearby camera shop. The rented projector ran hot. If I stayed on a specific slide for more than 60 seconds, the slide began to smoke. Literally. Colored smoke of course, wafting in strange tendrils towards the ceiling. Taught me a lot about pacing, mostly to make it faster.

By the way the word you are looking for, in re me & time travel, is not obsessed, it is focused. Let’s just be clear about that.

I had a lot of fun putting my NASA talk Temporal Paradoxes together. The feedback I got from the assembled multitude at the Radnor Library last week was extremely helpful, leading to a near complete rework of the talk, in the interests of making it clearer. Thanks!